Markets Are People

We talk about "the market" the way we talk about the weather -- a force, impersonal, out there. It rises and falls. It punishes and rewards. It has moods. The language is convenient and it is a lie, because a market has no existence apart from the people in it. Every tick of every price is a person deciding that this is worth more to them than that.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it. The customer is not a revenue event. The customer is a person who has trusted you with a piece of their one finite life, in exchange for a promise that you will make it better. To serve them well is not a marketing posture. It is the entire job.

The discipline of being chosen

Honest business has a strange and bracing discipline built into it: you have to be chosen, again and again, by people who are free to choose otherwise. You cannot command their loyalty. You cannot legislate away their alternatives -- not without becoming the very thing this community stands against. You can only earn them, by serving better than the next option.

That discipline is good for the soul. It keeps you close to the actual human need. It punishes self-deception. The company that forgets its customers are people gets the news eventually, and the news is always the same: they left.

Service is not a department

The mistake is to think service is the smiling face at the counter, a function you can staff and forget. But if a market is people, then service is the whole enterprise pointed at those people -- the product, the price, the honesty of the pitch, the keeping of the promise. A better mousetrap is an act of service. So is a fair price. So is telling a customer the truth when it costs you the sale.

This is the quiet thesis of everything we do here. Not that business should have ethics bolted onto it, but that great business, looked at honestly, already is a form of service -- and the better the business, the truer that is.